There are many objectives for detecting TV commercials. For example, companies who produce commercial advertisements (ads) generally charge other companies to verify that certain TV commercials are actually broadcast as contracted (e.g., broadcast at a specified level of quality for a specific amount of time, during a specific time slot, and so on). Companies who design ads typically research commercials to develop more influential advertisements. Thus, commercial detection techniques may also be desired to observe competitive advertising techniques or content.
Such commercial content verification/observation procedures are typically manually performed by a human being at scheduled broadcast time(s), or by searching (forwarding, rewinding, etc.) a record of a previous broadcast. As can be appreciated, waiting for a commercial to air (broadcast), setting up recording equipment to record a broadcast, and/or searching records of broadcast content to verify commercial content airing(s) can each be time consuming, laborious, and costly undertakings.
To make matters even worse, and in contrast to those that desire to view TV commercials, others may find commercial content aired during a program to be obtrusive, interfering with their preferred viewing preferences. That is, rather than desiring to view commercial content, such entities would rather not be presented with any commercial content at all. For example, a consumer may desire to record a TV program without recording commercials that are played during broadcast of the TV program. Unfortunately, unless a viewer actually watches a TV program in its entirety to manually turn on and off the recording device to selectively record non-commercial content, the viewer will typically not be able to record only non-commercial portions of the TV program.
In light of the above, whether the objective is to view/record commercial content or to avoid viewing/recording commercial content, existing techniques for commercial content detection to enable these goals are substantially limited in that they can be substantially time consuming, labor intensive, and/or largely ineffective across a considerable variety of broadcast genres. Techniques to overcome such limitations are greatly desired.